When making end-of-life decisions in intensive care units (ICUs), different staff groups have different roles in the decision-making process and may not always assess the situation in the same way. The aim of this study was to examine the challenges Danish nurses, intensivists, and primary physicians experience with end-of-life decisions in ICUs and how these challenges affect the decision-making process. Interviews with nurses, intensivists, and primary physicians were conducted, and data is discussed from an ethical perspective. All three groups found (...) that the main challenges were associated with interdisciplinary collaboration and future perspectives for the patient. Most of these challenges were connected with ethical issues. The challenges included different assessments of treatment potential, changes and postponements of withholding and withdrawing therapy orders, how and when to identify patients’ wishes, and suffering caused by the treatment. To improve end-of-life decision-making in the ICU, these challenges need to be addressed by interdisciplinary teams. (shrink)

Involuntary autobiographical memories are conscious memories of personal events that come to mind with no preceding attempts at retrieval. It is often assumed that such memories are closely related to current concerns – i.e., uncompleted personal goals. Here we examined involuntary versus voluntary autobiographical memories in relation to earlier registered current concerns measured by the Personal Concern Inventory . We found no differences between involuntary and voluntary memories with regard to frequency or characteristics of current concern-related contents. However, memories related (...) to current concerns were rated as more central to the person’s identity, life story and expectations for the future than non-concern-related memories, irrespective of mode of recall. Depression and PTSD symptoms correlated positively with the proportion of current concern-related involuntary and voluntary memories. The findings support the view that involuntary and voluntary remembering is subject to similar motivational constraints. (shrink)

This binary also speaks more generally to how we tend to conceive of the relation between place and space: As many scholars have pointed out, place often comes valued as "the sphere of the everyday, or real and valued practices," or "a locus of denial" trailing ideas of the "closed, coherent, integrated as authentic, as 'home', a secure retreat" (Massey 2005, 5-6). Doreen Massey's descriptions speak to our perceptions of a center, of a core toward which energy flows, and in (...) so doing marking, in Michel de Certeau's words, "an instantaneous configuration of positions. (shrink)

This paper discusses the interrelationship between wisdom, science and craft from the perspective of the Wittgenstein concept of tacit knowledge. It challenges the notion of the ‘rules-model’ as put forward by Logical Positivists, and shows the limitation of this model for describing the tacit dimension of knowledge. The paper demonstrates the crucial role of practice in ‘rule-following’ in the real world. It is held that ‘to follow a rule’ is to practice a custom, a usage or an institutional practice. Hence, (...) rules can only exist as a link in social life.The dream of the ‘precise’ language can only be realised in a closed scientific world. It is inadequate for reflecting the user's relationship to language and its content and practice in varied ‘use situations’. It is only through examples that we learn to deal with, describe, interpret and learn from the new situations.The rule-based models which are used to acquire and describe human knowledge in syntactic and propositional forms are, in effect, an impoverishment of the description of reality. It is argued that expert knowledge and linguistic knowledge are linked together and emerge as two sides of the same subject as the pragmatic perspective of reality. The tacit dimension of expert knowledge is, in many cases, more significant than the linguistic knowledge, especially in the case of the vocational and aesthetic world.The challenge to AI researchers, therefore, is to recognise that knowledge based systems which ignore the tacit dimension of expert knowledge not only distance the user from reality but also impoverish the learning process itself. (shrink)

The essay tries to blend diverse strands of thought. First comes a criticism of Quine's view(s) on quotation. This develops, somehow, into an ontology for linguistic items. Out of this, again, grows some more general reflections on the notions of speaker and speaking the same language: the identification of someone as a speaker becomes a central task, and the recognition of someone as speaking is of crucial importance in the acknowledgement that something is said. Running through it all, more as (...) ghost then spirit, is the seam of holism. (H. Johannessen, Universitetet i Trondheim; now at the University of Bergen). (shrink)

The Demonic in the Political Thought of Eusebius of Caesarea explores how Eusebius of Caesarea's ideas about demons interacted with and helped to shape his thought on other topics, particularly political topics Hazel Johannessen builds on and complements recent work on early Christian and early modern demonology. Eusebius' political thought has long drawn the attention of scholars who have identified in some of his works the foundations of later Byzantine theories of kingship. However, Eusebius' political thought has not previously (...) been examined in the light of his views on demons. Moreover, despite frequent references to demons throughout many of Eusebius' works, there has been no comprehensive study of Eusebius' views on demons, until now, as expressed throughout a range of his works.The originality of this study lies both in an initial examination of Eusebius' views on demons and their place in his cosmology, and in the application of the insights derived from this to consideration of his political thought. As a result of this new perspective, Johannessen challenges scholars' traditional characterization of Eusebius as a triumphal optimist. Instead, she draws attention to his concerns about a continuing demonic threat, capable of disrupting humankind's salvation, and presents Eusebius as a more cautious figure than the one familiar to late antique scholarship. (shrink)

Knut Olav Almås. Solum, 1994. 295 s. ISBN 82-560-0936-5 Den østerrrikske filosofen Wittgenstein var ikke bare opptatt av den norske vestlandsnaturen, men også fascinert av menneskene som levde der. Denne bio-grafien om ham har hans forhold til Norge som hovedtema. Her har en sett på hans bakgrunn for gjentatte Norges-besøk, og dokumentert hans relasjoner tilSkjolden-bygda i Sognefjorden. Her kan en presentere en rekke korrespondansemed mennesker fra Skjolden, alt for å kaste lys over Wittgenstein som både filosof og person. Det norske (...) filosofiske miljøet er svært preget av Witt- gensteins tenkning. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Paragrana Jahrgang: 25 Heft: 2 Seiten: 125-134.

In this article, I offer a literary-critical reading of Modernity and the Holocaust, arguing that Bauman’s non-Hobbesian ethics is linked to a form of Orphic authorship. I contextualize this reading with a study of three literary authors: W.G. Sebald, Peter Weiss and Janina Bauman, and their respective versions of this post-Holocaust authorship. At stake is the drama of the forbidden gaze, the moment when Orpheus turns to look at Eurydice, killing her a second time. Using Levinas’ ethics and his scenario (...) of recognition, Bauman re-writes this fateful gaze as a loving gaze, implicitly proposing a counter-model to the Schmittian gaze — always ready to recognize the enemy, always ready to kill. (shrink)

À propos de : Helmuth Plessner, Les Degrés de l’organique et l’Homme. Introduction à l’anthropologie philosophique, traduit par Pierre Osmo, Paris, Gallimard, 2017. Paru en langue allemande en 1928, il aura fallu attendre 89 ans avant de pouvoir lire en français ce grand texte de philosophie anthropologique cristallisant les prémisses et les fondements de ce que sera la pensée du XXe siècle autour de la question du vivant. Écrivant au carrefour des sciences humaines et des sciences naturelles...

This article examines the experiences of Norwegian high school girls with Muslim backgrounds in learning about Islam in religious education. The empirical material consists of observations from a high school class in Norway and interviews with girls in the class. The findings support previous reports that Islam as a topic may be challenging for students with Muslim backgrounds. They also suggest that the RE classroom is a space where religious boundaries can go from blurred to bright as a result of (...) students’ reactions to educational content and its foci on Islam. As many teachers find the topic of Islam potentially controversial and thus challenging to teach, this article offers insights that may help teachers to understand and deal with students’ reactions in the classroom context. (shrink)

In this article, the relevance of justice in care is discussed, with special regard to long-term care. After a short introduction laying out the conceptual framework of justice and care, followed by an exploration of some special challenges within long-term care, this article consists of two main parts. The first part deals with justice as a general (secular) philosophical phenomenon and draws especially upon principles of justice as developed by John Rawls. Both the principle of fair equality of opportunity and (...) the difference principle, according to which an unequal treatment may be justified, provided that those “worst off” benefit mostly and are relevant within the field of care. The feminist debate about an ethics of care is also considered since its more recent contributions offer interesting attempts to mediate between justice and care. The second part of the article introduces a Christian perspective on justice, with relevance for (long-term) care. From a Christian point of view, one will even more strongly than Rawls argue for a conception of justice, which gives priority to those worst off. It is also argued that justice and care converge in the practice of diakonia. Diakonia, in many traditions synonymous with the caring dimension of the church, always had a special focus on long-term care. In this kind of church-based practice, justice and care are reconciled. (shrink)

This article presents preliminary considerations and results from a research project designed to investigate the relation between gestures, graphic traces and perceptions. More specifically, the project aims to test the hypothesis that graphic traces, including handwriting, can set up graphetic empathy between writers and readers of traces across long temporal and spatial distances. Insofar as a graphic trace is lawfully related to the gesture by which it came into being, the trace itself will hold information about the gesture, which may (...) resonate with the sensorimotor system of a perceiver, as if they themselves performed the gesture. If this is in fact so, it will have important and hitherto unanticipated implications for our understanding of the embodiment of reading. As part of the article we will present and discuss the results of a neurophenomenological trial study through which we attempt to operationalize the gesture-trace and trace–perception relations respectively. (shrink)

It is argued in this article that the concept of practice is one of the key concepts in Wittgenstein's later philosophy. It partly replaces his earlier talk about the inexpressible. ?The practice has to speak for itself, as Wittgenstein succinctly puts it. The concept of practice not only points to the ways in which the unity of our concepts are underpinned, as Gordon Baker has it, it also comprises the skills involved in handling the conceptualized phenomena, our prereflective familiarity with (...) them, expressed in the sureness in our behaviour towards them, and the judgmental power exercised in applying or withholding a given concept on a particular occasion. These factors are all relevant to the establishment of knowledge, but they cannot themselves be fully and straightforwardly articulated by verbal means. Nevertheless, they represent what we go by when we apply concepts and other types of rules. To follow a rule is what Wittgenstein calls a practice. The sketched analysis of this concept makes us understand better how it is possible to apply a rule without the support of another rule. It also makes us realize in what sense one is justified in talking about tacit knowledge in connection with the application of concepts and rule?following in general. Quite a lot hangs on seeing the world aright at this point. (shrink)

This interview with Randall Collins explores the role of interaction rituals (IR) in our increasingly digital world. For Collins, IR is a micro-sociological mechanism that provides both the glue that holds social groups together and the energy that fuels disputes and domination. Crucially, Collins posits that IRs are most effective under face-to-face or “bodily copresent” conditions. The pivotal question of this interview is how well this proposition holds in an age where interaction increasingly takes place through and with technologies. The (...) interview begins with Collins explaining how he became interested in IR, before moving on to consider topics such as whether bodily copresence is as important today as it was when he wrote Interaction Ritual Chains (2004); the relative importance of online and offline IRs; how AI might change our ritual landscape; the role of materiality in the ritual process; and whether IR theory will continue to be as relevant in the future. (shrink)

In Stoic physics, blending (κρᾶσις) is the relation between active pneuma and passive matter; natural bodies from rocks and logs to plants, animals and the cosmos itself are blends of pneuma and matter. Blending structures the Stoic cosmos. I develop a new interpretation of the Stoic theory of blending, based on passages from Hierocles. The theory of blending, I argue, has been misunderstood. Hierocles allows us to see in detail how the theory is supposed to work and how it fits (...) into Stoic physics. (shrink)

In this article I attack the scandalous one-sidedness of traditional philosophical epistemology. I make clear its total dependence on one and only one paradigm of knowledge – propositional knowledge. Such knowledge presupposes that we are always capable of fully articulate our knowledge verbally or notationally and support it by empirical or formal reasons. On this basis it becomes quite impossible to say anything sensible about, for instance, professional knowledge, not to speak of aesthetical or moral knowledge. Some of us have (...) been aware of this for quite a while as Michael Polanyi already in 1958 pointed it out in his book Personal Knowledge. His most famous statement is: «We know more than we can tell». And he argues that we possess a great amount of tacit knowledge. Therefore we need appropriate categories for handling the various kinds of knowledge which cannot be articulated as propositional knowledge. And that is Polanyi’s weak spot. Inspired by Wittgenstein’s remark in Philosophical Investigations § 78 concerning knowing and saying how high Mont Blanc is, how the word «game» is used and how a clarinet sounds, I have developed an alternative approach where becomes propositional knowledge, becomes various forms of practical knowledge and becomes various kinds of knowledge by familiarity. is a sort of first person knowledge which we are quite unable to express verbally to someone who is unfamiliar with the instruments of the Western musical tradition. On this basis I sketchily analyse the paradigm of knowledge in traditional philosophical epistemology and point out a series of its shortcomings. In the second part of my article I take a close look at a rather new contribution to the discussion of tacit knowledge, written by one of the leading figures within the research field called «the sociology of scientific knowledge» – Harry Collins. His book is called Tacit and Explicit Knowledge and was published in 2010. And his primary aim of the book is to «reconstruct the idea of tacit knowledge from first principles so that the concept’s disparate domains have a common conceptual language». I perform a close reading of his development of the common conceptual language and conclude that he does not succeed. He creates a monstrous terminology which just alienates us from the subject instead of making us see the connections between the «disparate domains» of tacit knowledge. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Das German Diagnosis Related Groups (G-DRG)-System hat zu einem weitgehend erlösorientierten Krankenhausfinanzierungssystem geführt. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden die ethischen Implikationen und Folgen dieses Systems am Beispiel rekonstruktiver Maßnahmen (Defektversorgung) bei Patient*innen mit Mundhöhlenkarzinomen herausgearbeitet. Dabei gilt es zugleich, das Wechselspiel von G‑DRG-System und Leitlinienentwicklung zu beleuchten. Vorangestellt werden einführende Angaben zum Mundhöhlenkarzinom und den bestehenden Behandlungsoptionen: konventionelle Rekonstruktionstechnik versus kostenintensive High-End-Chirurgie. Methodische Grundlage und argumentativer Bezugspunkt der Arbeit ist das theoretische Fallszenario „Versorgung mittelgroßer Defekte nach Tumorresektion“. Das G‑DRG-System und (...) die dadurch geschaffenen ökonomischen Anreize haben weitreichende ethische Implikationen in der bedarfsorientierten Behandlung von Patient*innen und führen zu mehrdimensionalen Wechselwirkungen. Die bestehende Tendenz zur High-End-Chirurgie birgt das Risiko der Über- und Fehlversorgung und läuft demnach den Prinzipien Benefizienz und Nonmalefizienz zuwider. Die einseitige Indikationsstellung zugunsten der High-End-Chirurgie lässt zudem auf eine direktive Patientenaufklärung schließen (Verstoß gegen das Prinzip des Respekts der Patientenautonomie). Kostspielige High-End-Verfahren konterkarieren überdies das Wirtschaftlichkeitsgebot und berühren somit zugleich Fragen der Verteilungsgerechtigkeit. Schließlich wirkt die klinische Bevorzugung von High-End-Verfahren auch auf die innermedizinische Logik, namentlich auf die Publikationslandschaft (publication bias), die Ausgestaltung der betreffenden Leitlinien sowie auf die chirurgische Expertise. Zu fordern ist eine Sensibilisierung aller in der Chirurgie tätigen Akteur*innen (Chirurg*innen; Leitlinienexpert*innen, Gutachter*innen). (shrink)

In this article, the author intends to show the conditions which affect the formation of the person in the family, and how economic and cultural changes of modern society and the feminist movement affect the correct development of the child, which have repurcussions in the future behavior of an adult.